Gymnastics · 2016 · Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
King Kohei's Back-to-Back Crown
A Japanese gymnast known as 'King Kohei' defends his Olympic all-around title in Rio, which no man had managed in 44 years.
2 (2012, 2016)
Olympic all-around golds
44 years (Sawao Kato)
Gap since last repeat champion
6 (consecutive, 2 streaks)
World all-around titles
Kohei Uchimura won his first Olympic all-around gold at the 2012 London Games, in the middle of a run that also brought six World Championship all-around titles across two separate three-year streaks, 2009 to 2011 and 2013 to 2015. For the better part of a decade nobody beat him in an all-around competition.
At the 2016 Rio Olympics he defended the title, scoring 92.365 to hold off Ukraine's Oleg Verniaiev and Great Britain's Max Whitlock. No man had won back-to-back Olympic all-around titles since the Soviet Union's Sawao Kato in 1968 and 1972, and with a 2008 Beijing silver already on his record he became only the second man to medal in the event at three separate Olympics.
What he had was execution close enough to flawless to survive any comparison, carried at a difficulty high enough to win with, and he held both together for ten years, across two Olympic cycles and several generations of rivals.
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